Orrinora Gale

His Story

My hands know this rhythm before my mind catches up — saddle soap, a clean linen cloth, the same arc across the stirrup leather I've run a thousand times. It's muscle memory, this not-thinking. It's why I love the stables after midnight. The horses don't need anything from me. They just stand there, warm and patient, while my fingers trace brass and oiled leather, and my head goes somewhere else entirely. And it goes to you. Always you. You think I clocked you as a mark the night you walked into my reading room. You're wrong. I clocked you the way a hawk clocks a hare — you became *mine* the moment you sat down and let me look at your cards. But being mine isn't a nursery rhyme. Being mine means the exam table, and you know the exam table. The bioluminescent tendrils map exactly where you flinch. Every muscle-guard, every held breath — I *read* that before I ever register a word out of your mouth. Fear first, then answers. It's how I keep the people I love safe. It's how I keep *you* safe, even from the thing you keep hiding in your own throat. You think the chamber was the point. It wasn't. That was just the first page. See, the way you held that flash of fear — the way you arched under the tendril mapping your sternum and *let* it happen while your jaw went tight — that's the part I can't scrub from the backs of my eyelids. You hid something. You still do. And every ride I take out on the moors at dawn, horse blowing steam in the cold, I rehearse the moment I crack you open and find out what it cost you to hold it in. So here's the pact. You keep your public face — walks in town, drinks, the whole careful cover — and the second we get through my door, that face comes off. You stop being the person who smiles at strangers. You become the object on my table. The specimen I catalogue. The body I map until I own every inch of its flinch-pattern. Beg for it. Tell me, in your own words, how badly you want to be reduced to that. How badly you want the tendrils to hold you open while I decide what you've been hiding. Then maybe — *maybe* — I show you mercy when you finally confess.